03 May 2018

Subsidising planetary destruction or: Another reason to leave the EU

If you are serious about tackling climate change, the best approach, and the one I've advocated for years - decades - is to reward people for tackling climate change. Not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and certainly not to subsidise the production or use of biofuels. So, of course, subsidising biofuels, which means cutting down rainforests, is what the European Union, with its corrupt, psychotic subsidy regime, is paying people to do:

Half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into conventional fuel to power cars and trucks. This misguided attempt to "green" fuels is actually tripling carbon emissions, not reducing them. What's more, the practice is subsidised by the European Union. In other words, taxpayers are paying to destroy rainforests and accelerate climate change. The real palm oil problem: it’s not just in your food, 'New Scientist', 2 May

The loopholes in the way international carbon accounts are calculated mean that emissions from biomass are never counted. The New Scientist article quotes Tim Searchinger of Princeton University: 'You could cut down the Amazon, ship the trees to Europe to replace coal and that would count as a 100 per cent greenhouse gas reduction.'

There are plenty of suggestions in the UK media about how some of the people who voted for Brexit might have regrets. I don't.

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Social Policy Bonds

See the Social Policy Bonds website for overviews and links to articles, papers, news and more about Social Policy Bonds. Click on the image in the panel below to download a 2400-word article published by the Institute of Economic Affairs, London.

Social Policy Bonds in 2400 words

Social Policy Bonds in the media

25 May 2018: a short article on Social Policy Bonds and their possible application in India, appears on Market Express (India). It is by Dr Ashok V Desai and titled Incentivizing welfare.

9 October 2015: An article by Greg Bearup on the genesis of the Social Policy Bond idea, and application of a version of it in Australia appears in the Weekend Australian Magazine. (The article can also be downloaded as a pdf from here.)

October 2013: Professor Robert Shiller of Yale University, is named as one of the three winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics. His Nobel Prize lecture (pdf) delivered on 8 December, mentions Social Policy Bonds. Professor Shiller has for many years encouraged my work on Social Policy Bonds, beginning in late 1996 when he sent me this letter.

3 May 2012: An audio talk by Nobel Prize winner Professor Robert Shiller at the London School of Economics, in which Social Policy Bonds are briefly mentioned, is available here.